Werner’s assessment of the rest of the album was also on point. “If ‘It’s All Right’ suggested that Mayfield had lost control,” he wrote,
the best songs on the album—“People Never Give Up,” “Never Stop Loving Me,” and the searching “Something to Believe In”—demonstrated his profound understanding of the gospel vision. Even as he stood alone on the dance floor, contemplating the inevitable collapse of the disco community, Mayfield testified to the power of love. But whatever the lyrics might claim, the sound warned forebodingly of the coming world in which nothing was going to be all right.
After the triumphs and heartbreaks of the ’60s and ’70s, no one knew what to expect from the new decade. In the ’80s, black people continued the symbolic act of renaming, adopting the term African American to pay homage to their historical roots. Despite this progress, it seemed the beautiful moment to change America had passed.
From the beginning, Dad looked at the ’80s askance. Less than ten years prior, he said in an interview, “I think people in general will finally find that violence … is really not the way,” and he’d spoken of “living in harmony, which might sort of force the establishment, who say their way is the only way, to finally feel there is another way to make things work out.” With Ronald Reagan spearheading a conservative backlash, Dad couldn’t muster the same hope in the ’80s. Now he said, “Everything’s changed and nothing’s changed…. If it has always been that way, what makes you think it’s going to change? It’s like a bowl of fat, whichever way you tip it, the rich stuff’s going to be on top and the lean stuff’s gonna be underneath.”
As usual, he hadn’t completely given up hope. Something to Believe In showed him still trying to motivate his audience, only he didn’t have the same audience anymore. Few listened. The album didn’t sell, and Dad entered a new part of his career where he accepted his declining popularity with wisdom and resignation. “Stars are made to burn,” he said. “Does it matter whether there is a time when you’re not number one? It only gave me time to put some of my main thoughts toward other important things, like being a father. It’s the media that always asks, ‘Why aren’t you still as big as you were?’ Well, why aren’t I still twenty-two?” In a way, it took the pressure off him and allowed him to return to making the music of his heart.
Where poor decision-making had marred his career for the past five years, bad luck now played just as large a part. When he came off a tour with Linda Clifford, RSO collapsed, and Dad had to shut down Curtom, firing fifty-five employees, including many who had worked for him since the beginning. It seemed his dream of owning his own label, which he’d toiled at for a quarter century, had finally died. “I had the ambition to want to be rich like Motown and Berry Gordy,” he said.
I was striving for that like you can’t believe. Everything I was doing was pulling myself up by my boot-straps, both with OKeh and with the Impressions, who were working three-hundred-sixty-five days a year. With every little bit that was done I could see myself closer to the dream. But it took a little bit more than I could handle myself to make another Motown. It just wasn’t in the cards for one man to run a publishing company, be a recording artist, and be a producer.
He added a bit of searing self-evaluation, as he often proved capable of, saying, “You’d be surprised how many businessmen ain’t businessmen when it comes to trying to collect for everything they do.”
Mourning the loss of Curtom, he also cut ties with his hometown and moved to Atlanta full time. “That Chicago weather,” he said, trying to paint a bright picture on his departure. “Man, that Hawk’ll get you.” There were other reasons for the move, though. Chicago’s race problems persisted—a 1980 census named it the most segregated city in the country—and my father found himself in the ironic position of feeling more comfortable as an African American in the South. “I’ve always felt that the mass of black people in Atlanta were trying to achieve things, run businesses, own their own homes,” he said. “Maybe that was because of what they were up against, it’s segregation that politicizes black people, makes them hold together. Atlanta was Martin Luther King’s home, and the lifestyle is very positive.”
Chicago was not the same city my father grew up in, either. Record Row was defunct—the labels had gone out of business or moved their operations to other cities. The place that once held some of the most groundbreaking, world-beating music on the planet quickly deteriorated into an empty echo chamber. “The music scene was kind of drying up in Chicago,” my father said. “All the musicians moved to either L.A., New York or Philly. Of course, you know Chicago is my home. I love it, but my needs and my desires were quite different. I guess after coming up in the city all your life, you can appreciate a little bit of ground around you. Atlanta had trees, space, some of those things you want to have. It was a good place for the children.”
That last part was especially important. Music had enthralled him for more than two decades. It dictated his life, defined him, made him a millionaire, gave him the pride and security he had never had as a ghetto child. It took him around the world several times over, introduced him to the highest echelons of business and art, made him an icon to his generation. At the same time, it commandeered his time and commanded his focus. As the 1980s began and he looked ahead to his thirty-eighth birthday, my father shifted his focus for the first time since high school. “Life isn’t just music,” he said. “Go to your family. Raise your kids. Find out what you’re all about other than music.”
Of course, he was still mostly about music. Though he’d just witnessed the death of his greatest dream with the loss of Curtom, he set about planning the construction of a new studio next to the house in Atlanta so he could be both a father and musician in the same place. “I saw the situation as an ideal opportunity to unite all my business and family life in one place,” he said. “One day I hope to reactivate Curtom records. I still own the name and all the masters, and there is some great, as yet unissued music there that should be released.”
In late 1981, he got in touch with Neil Bogart, his old friend who once represented Curtom at Buddah. Bogart had just started a new label, Boardwalk, and accumulated a diverse roster including Ringo Starr, Joan Jett, the Ohio Players, and Harry Chapin. Just like old times, Bogart came through. My father had a new label.
Recording in Atlanta, he made Love Is the Place. “At that time, I wasn’t so hot so we were all looking for the right recipe to bring me back,” he said. Against all odds, they found it—sort of. Curtis, working again with cowriters, created a strong and consistent album. He wrote songs in a feel-good mode that also had substance, strong hooks, and soul. The first single, a calypso-tinged love song called “She Don’t Let Nobody (But Me),” hit number fifteen on the R&B chart, his highest showing since 1976. The second single, “Toot an’ Toot an’ Toot,” also did well compared to his recent releases, reaching number twenty-two R&B. It marked his last significant showing on the charts.
Love Is the Place left him unsatisfied, though. Once again, other people wrote for or with him on many of the songs, and after years of declining popularity, he faced the exasperating reality of not calling the shots. “I wanted it to be a lot funkier, but then I suppose that’s what Boardwalk were trying to get away from,” Dad said. “They didn’t want to do an album that was a hundred percent Mayfield.” Still, feeling momentum building, he worked on his next album, Honesty, and reconnected with another old friend who would help revive his career overseas.
By that time, John Abbey, Dad’s old friend from England, also lived in Atlanta. One night, John walked into Morrison’s Restaurant and saw my father sitting across the room. “Curtis was there with his posse as usual, all the deadbeats who followed him around,” John says. “I went over, came behind him like how you do with kids, you put your hand on their eyes and say, ‘Guess who this is.’ And he just sat there and said, ‘Hey, John Abbey.’ And that was it. It was like I’d just seen him the day before.”
As they resumed
their friendship, my father discussed where his career stood and the frustration he felt at losing control over its direction. “I think he was kind of disillusioned with the industry,” John says.
I think there was a battle going on in his mind over exactly what he wanted to do. There were times when he said, “I’m just going to retire.” There were other times when he wanted to reinvent himself. Part of the thing that was holding him back was that he saw his music a certain way. And I know he wasn’t willing to meet anybody halfway. His music was his music, and that was one of the artistic problems that he had with record companies later on when he wasn’t the superstar in terms of selling records, because in the record industry you’re only as good as your last record. There was a resentment that he felt that people were trying to tell him how to reinvent himself. His thing was, “If I’m going to reinvent myself, I’m going to do it myself.”
In fact, Dad did feel those things. When he spoke about them, anger burned through his usually cool demeanor. “I’ve been in this business for thirty years, so I can see through all the bullshit,” he told an interviewer. “A record deal is like a marriage, you have to be totally satisfied with your partner, and I don’t want someone who … does a half-assed job. I want to give everything and be given everything.”
Since he had little traction in the United States, he asked John about touring overseas, like they did in the early ’70s. John worked with a Japanese company at the time and within a few months he had put together a Japanese tour. It went so well, my father instructed him to “just keep doing it.” The next summer, Dad had European and South African tours booked. He also went on a “Silver Anniversary” American tour with Jerry and the Impressions—a victory lap, as they celebrated twenty-five years in the business.
Needing a bass player for the tour, Dad turned to Tracy, finally honoring his son’s passion to play music. At that time, Tracy was pursuing a music degree at Eastern Illinois University, but when he got the call, he couldn’t wait to join the band. Unfortunately, the other band members weren’t as excited. “The musicians gave me hell,” he recalls. “I was miserable. I guess they thought I wasn’t good enough. These were the best players from Chicago, and here I am playing with them—a little punk kid, they thought.”
A month passed on the road before the band backed off and showed him respect. “I had to prove myself nightly,” he says. “Everybody got solos, so if the audience liked your solo, we’d say you ‘got a good house.’ The audience let them know I was OK. They couldn’t go around that, because I got the audience approval. So I didn’t need theirs anymore.”
On tour, Tracy met Curtis Mayfield the businessman, not the dad. He’d caught glimpses of that man hanging around the studio as a child, but now he worked for him. He learned Curtis Mayfield always got his money up front. “He didn’t go on stage one time in San Diego on the Silver Anniversary tour,” Tracy says. “They didn’t have all of our money, and they were trying to get him to go on stage. I remember him talking to the promoter, and he was very stern. He said, ‘I’m not getting on that stage without my money.’ And they kept trying to get him on stage, and he said, ‘You all need to clear the bar.’ The audience had to keep drinking because they had to get enough money from the bar to pay us before we got on stage. They waited a long time. I’m talking about at least forty minutes to an hour, we did not go on that stage.”
He also learned Curtis Mayfield knew a few tricks when it came to playing music. “I didn’t tune to F-sharp, of course,” Tracy says. “I used standard tuning. I remember him wanting to show me what he wanted me to do for ‘Superfly,’ the buildup at the end. He said, ‘Give me your bass.’ I’m thinking to myself, ‘What is he going to do with that? What is he going to show me?’ So he picked up my bass and he played exactly what he wanted me to play. That blew me away. I didn’t know he could even play regular bass. That’s like, ‘I’m going to play in this language, and I’m playing this language too.’ Not many people can do that. And I saw him do it regularly.”
While Tracy knew about his dad the Gemini, he learned Curtis Mayfield was just as impulsive and unpredictable on stage as he was at home. One night, the band sweated it out at a nice theater in front of three thousand people when Curtis Mayfield turned to Tracy and said, “Hey, cat—‘We People Who Are Darker Than Blue.’” Tracy looked down at his feet. “Dad,” he said, “The band doesn’t know that song.” Curtis Mayfield shot him a look and retorted, “Don’t worry about it. Follow me.” He kicked into a song his band had never rehearsed. “You could hear a pin drop,” Tracy says. “I looked up at the keyboard player, and he looked at me like a deer in headlights, and I’m like, ‘I can’t do nothing about it, man. We in it now.’ We were all sucking air right there—why are you going to do that to us? But that’s the kind of performer he was. He felt it. He wanted to do it at that point, and it was done. And we didn’t mess up, either.”
The tour had many high points, including a concert in Chicago where the mayor pronounced it “Curtis Mayfield Day.” Press reviews ranged from enthusiastic to laudatory, including a rather colorful description in NME of a show in Los Angeles:
There were no strings attached, just brass and reeds, Curtis’s son Tracy on bass, and six black gents in white tuxedos with satin lapels: Nate Evans’ quarterback shoulders, Vandy Hampton’s Professor Cornelius perm, the smile Sam Gooden’s been wearing for forty-nine years, the grizzled grey pate and granpappy specs of Curtis Mayfield, Fred Cash’s tongue rolling over his lower lip like an uncooked chipolata, and, one unto himself, Jerry Butler, with his eyelids at half-mast like those of a blind man.
Just as my father gained some momentum, though, bad luck came calling again, this time wrapped in tragedy. After coming off the road with the Impressions, he learned Neil Bogart had died of cancer, sending Boardwalk into a freefall. Within days, he embarked on another European tour. The audience Dad had attracted on his trips there in the early ’70s with Craig, Master Henry, Lucky, and Tyrone, created a surge in popularity that had only grown despite his declining fortunes in America. As one reviewer noted, “Curtis delivers sixty magical minutes, backed by a group, including his son Tracy on bass, that steams through the set—top musicians each one, they have come straight off an American tour on which Curtis and Jerry Butler together celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Impressions. Mayfield is visibly amused when mention of them draws a puzzled silence from the young crowd.”
When he returned to America, Boardwalk stood on the verge of collapse. With the help of Epic Records, they eked out the release of Honesty, which didn’t sell well, and then Curtis found himself without a label again. It was a trio of hard blows—an old friend dead, a record deal defunct, and an album failed.
He dealt with it by retreating further into the confines of his room. “After touring, Dad shut down,” Tracy recalls. “You wouldn’t hear from him for months. And it’d be many times we’d go over his house, and you would have to talk to him through the door. He would not come out the room. He wouldn’t take phone calls. He wouldn’t return phone calls.”
Dad had a nice setup in the basement with a big screen TV, and we’d often play chess or shoot pool down there, but he seemed to prefer the solitude of his room. I never knew exactly what he did in there, but many people around us believed Dad was sinking further into drugs, possibly cocaine. I never saw him do it, but it seems plausible. Regardless of what he was doing, when I’d knock on his bedroom door and say, “Dad, I’m hungry, come make me something to eat,” and he’d talk through the door instead of opening it, I knew something was amiss.
During that period he became more unpredictable, lending credence to the possibility of a growing drug habit. We never knew which promises he’d keep. Sharon says, “I felt like I couldn’t rely on him to do things. I remember [when I visited him in Atlanta] he often wouldn’t pick me up from the airport. I’d call him and say, ‘Dad? I’m here.’ He’d say, ‘Oh yeah, I’ll be right there,’ or, ‘Oh, Robert, he will send
someone out.’ And I didn’t like that. I didn’t like someone else picking me up. I wanted him to pick me up.”
Tracy experienced similar feelings. “We’ve all been disappointed a lot by his personality,” he says. “I mean, just promising us something, just spending time with us and he wouldn’t show up. [He was] always making promises. I was trying to get a record contract at one point for myself, he’d just have me record all these tracks and make promises that he wouldn’t deliver. Then, you know, I’d bust out more tracks, and he’d make more promises, and he wouldn’t deliver on those.”
He also continued his spotted history of physical abuse toward women, now with Altheida. I remember seeing her with a black eye and asking what happened. She made an excuse for it, but we knew what was going on. In his personal life as well as his creative one, my father had sunk to a low point.
His Gemini duality made him strive to be a family man despite his shortcomings as a partner, and in quick succession, he and Altheida had six children, leaving him with ten children spread across three separate families. He wanted us all to get along and made an effort to include everyone in trips and activities. We also spent a good amount of time with Curtis III and Helen. “Helen was extremely nice to us,” Tracy recalls. “Never once did I feel any negativity from her.” Sharon, however, noticed tension between Dad and Helen when he’d drop us off.
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